The boats were lowered and the people on deck could see, if dimly, that they were out of immediate danger, and that went a long way toward pacifying them. It was a matter of ferrying people to that jagged dark pinnacle of rock the boat had struck in the dark, a matter of patience, that was all. No one was going to drown. No one was going to lose his belongings. Stay clam. Be calm. Wait your turn. And so it went, the boats pushing off and returning over the space of the next two hours till everyone but the crew had been evacuated — and then the crew, and lastly the captain, came too. What they didn’t realize, through the duration of a very damp and chilled night with the sea rising and the fog settling in to erase all proportion, was that the rock on which they’d landed was some two hundred yards offshore of the main island and that in the morning they’d have to be ferried through the breakers a second time.
It was a week before they were rescued. Provisions were salvaged from the ship before she went down, but they weren’t nearly enough to go round. Fights broke out over the allotment of rations and over the gold too, so that finally Captain Blunt — in full view of the assembled passengers — was forced to pinion two of the malefactors, gold thieves, on the abrasive dark shingle and horsewhip them to the satisfaction of all and even a scattering of applause. A number of the men took it upon themselves to fish from shore in the hope of augmenting their provisions. Others gathered mussels and abalone, another shot a seal and roasted it over an open fire. When finally news of the wreck reached San Francisco, and three ships, the Goliah, the Republic and the California, steamed down the coast to evacuate the passengers, no one was sorry to see the black cliffs of Anacapa fade back into the mist. The ship was lost. The passengers had endured a night of terror and a week of boredom, sunburn and enforced dieting. But no one had died and the gold, or the greater share of it, had been preserved.
As for the rats, they are capable swimmers with deep reserves of endurance and a fierce will to survive. Experiments have shown that the average rat can tread water for some forty-eight hours before succumbing, can grip and climb vertical wires, ropes, cables and smooth-boled trees with the facility of a squirrel and is capable of compressing its body to fit through a hole no wider around than the circumference of a quarter. And too, rats have a superb sense of balance and most often come to shore adrift on floating debris, whether that debris consists of loose cushions, odd bits of wood planking, whiskey bottles, portmanteaux and other flotsam or rafts of vegetation washed down out of canyons during heavy rains. Certainly some of the rats aboard the Winfield Scott, trapped in the hold when the baggage shifted or inundated before they could scramble up onto the deck, were lost, but it’s likely that the majority made it to shore. Of course, all it would have taken was a pair of them. Or even a single pregnant female.
In any case, as Alma is prepared to inform her audience, the black rats—Rattus rattus, properly — that survived the wreck of the Winfield Scott made their way, over the generations, from that naked rock to middle Anacapa and from there to the eastern islet, and finally, afloat on a stick of driftwood or propelled by their own industrious paws, to the westernmost. Only luck and the six miles of open water of the Anacapa Passage, with its boiling spume and savage currents, has kept them from expanding their range to Santa Cruz. And no one, not even the most inveterate rodent lover, would want that.
The Prius is aglow with the soft amber light of the dashboard as it slips almost silently along the streaming freeway, Tim relaxed behind the wheel and offering a running commentary on the news leaking out of the radio, his way of calming her, of pretending that there’s nothing out of the ordinary about this little jaunt to the museum. As if they were going to stroll arm-in-arm through the exhibits, examining the Chumash tomol and the skeleton of the Santa Rosa Island dwarf mammoth for the twentieth time, drawing down their voices to laugh and joke and feel at home amidst the dry stifled odor of preservation. Alma would have driven herself, except that she likes to free her mind before speaking in public and has learned from experience that the focus required of driving — however minimal and however short the distance — distracts her. There always seems to be some sort of problem on the road, an accident, a lane closure for repaving or reshouldering or whatever it is they do along the freeway at night — or mayhem, simple mayhem, bad manners, cell phone abuse, people with their heads screwed on backward — and the delay upsets her equilibrium. When you see brake lights ahead you never know if you’ll be stopped for five minutes or an hour. Or your life. The rest of your life.
Sure enough, half a mile from their exit, they run into a wash of brake lights and in the next moment they’re stalled behind a pickup truck elevated up off the roadway on a gleaming web of struts higher than the dwarf mammoth could ever have hoped to reach. “Shit,” she hisses, and she’s biting her lip, a bad habit, she knows it, but she can’t help herself. “I knew we should’ve gone the back way.”
Tim shrugs, reaches out a hand to switch channels, the reporter’s intimate placatory tones dissolving in the thump and rattle of timbales, congas and cowbells and the keening almost-human voice of a guitar rising up out of the deluge of percussion. “It’s probably nothing,” he says. “We’ve got twenty minutes yet. And Mission’s the next exit. See it? Right there — under this moron’s rear end?”
She doesn’t respond. Just turns her head and gazes out the window on the auto mall in the near distance — more cars — and lets the air run out of her lungs in a long withering sigh. It’s not Tim’s fault and she doesn’t mean to take it out on him. He’s doing the best he can, and the quickest way, no question about it, is the freeway. How could he know this was going to happen? (Though she did argue for the back way the minute he flicked on the signal light for the freeway. Isn’t it rush hour still? she’d said. Or the tail end of it? Nah, he assured her. Not now. We’ll be all right.) So it was his call. And she went along with it. And here they are. Stopped dead.
After a while he says, “Must be an accident.”
She’s dressed all in black — pressed cotton slacks, patent-leather heels and V-necked top accented by a modest silver bracelet and necklace, nothing showy, nothing anybody could object to — and her notes are tucked inside the manila folder atop the laptop balanced on her knees. It took her a long while that afternoon to decide on what to wear, trying to strike a balance between the formal and the casual, the ecologist dragged in from the field and turned out with just the right degree of chic to be persuasive and sympathetic rather than intimidating, and she spent the better part of an hour combing out her hair and applying her makeup. Too much eyeliner and she’d look like a slut. Too little and they wouldn’t be able to see the shape of her eyes and the way the light gathered in them and made people stop to stare at her on the street, because looking good, or at least stylish and interesting, was part of the job description. Who wanted to sit there in a stiff-backed chair and have some dowdy forest-service type rattle off statistics about the decline of this species or that? She was there to be looked at, as well as listened to, and she had no problem with that. If she could use her looks to advance her cause, then so much the better.